But before I do this, it is worth asking whether the green's interpretation of climate change science suffers from biases or intellectual skews. The indicators are that it does, and even that there are some pretty squalid distortions taking place. Greenpeace tell us that:
"The impacts of climate change
are already being felt. Average global temperatures have risen every decade
since the 1970s, and the 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since
1997".
This is
true, but not necessarily compelling. Temperatures come in ups and downs.
Measuring a few years since the 1970s just won't do. Below is a much more
comprehensive set of data - it's
If you Google graphs of global temperatures going back a few hundred years all the way back to 500 million years you'll see something interesting - we may be in
a warm period, and quite a long one at that, but we are not in unprecedented
territory - the planet has had similar peaks in the past. As you can see from
the first graph, even the current warm period began several thousand years
before the Industrial Revolution (the prior cooling period was down to an ice
age). Given the foregoing observations, it's going to take quite a bit more
than simply stating "We are in a current warm period" to show that
this warm period is uniquely different to the others to the extent that we are
the primary causers of a global catastrophe that needs mitigating by the green's
preventative actions. The graphs show us that future scientific predictions
should be done with humility. But even if scientists can confidently make forecasts
about future global temperatures (it is thought that in the next 100 years
global temperatures should increase from somewhere between 2-5%), such
forecasts should come with some caveats.
Some scientists argue that climate modelling should be trusted
because it is specific and can point to physical laws that are currently
observable and constant. Alas, this is only half-true - but even if it were
wholly true, that still does not justify such confidence that the green
policies are the right ones. Just because a model relies on physical laws
doesn't mean it has far teaching predictability. The weather relies on physical
laws, but it does not have far reaching predictability. The predictions are
relatively short-term; and in issues surrounding the perturbations of the
environment short-term predictions are not very reliable antecedents for
long-term outcomes.
Every day up until now 25 year old Julie has had eyesight good
enough that she does not need glasses. She may justifiably predict that she
won't in all likelihood need glasses in the next few days, nor weeks, nor maybe
even months. But if she used those extrapolations to predict that she won't
need glasses by the time she is 70, we would say that her short-term indicators
are bad indicators for the future 45 years henceforward. Short-term climate
change science suffers from the same problem. Trying to rely on long term
predictions by extrapolating current patterns would be a bit like a man from
another planet visiting earth for the first time in January and measuring the
temperature in Trafalgar Square every day from January 1st through to August
the 1st (increasing over the months from freezing up to 28°), and hypothesising
that by December the temperature in Trafalgar Square will be 40°.
Furthermore, merely focusing on the physics is not helping the
green’s cause. No one disputes that the underlying physics behind any putative
climate changes gives us empirical objects of study - and few deny that changes
will occur. But the issue has never been about that - it has always been about
how humans will respond to those changes.
Greens
seem to have this faux-idealism that when it comes to temperature the world has
some kind of objective optimality. It does not - some places benefit from
higher temperatures, some from lower - but more than that - temperatures change
over the centuries, and humans adapt to them - there is no optimal design for
us. If there is no optimal design then this green metric of idealism that they
use as a stick with which to beat us is misjudged. We cannot be castigated for
contributing to the wrong kinds of temperature if there is no right temperature.
Yes it
may be true that climate change is in some parts anthropogenic, but most of
what we’ve done industrially and technologically has been to the huge benefit
of the human race, not least in the way in which the industrial revolution and
consequent progression-explosion of the past 200 years has increased life
expectancy, prosperity, well-being, knowledge, and the many other qualities
that benefit the human race. Don’t forget that our global emissions in the past
century have been part of the very same scientific and industrial advancements
that have facilitated this human progression. To criticise our innovations as
being environmentally detrimental is a bit like criticising a vegetable patch
for ruining perfectly good soil, or criticising medicine for ruining perfectly
good plants.
For part two of this series - Climate Change Debate Part II: Why We Don't Owe Future Generations As Much As We Think click here.
